To Compete on E-Commerce, Otto Group Turns to Web Analytics

Name of Organization: Otto Group

Industry: Retail

Location: Lohne, Germany

Business Opportunity or Challenge:

The Otto Group is the largest online retailer for fashion and lifestyle in Europe and the second-largest online retailer in the world with end-consumers. The company’s operations cover the whole retail value chain—including sourcing, transportation and marketing, and financial services. The company is present in more than 20 countries with 123 major companies. The company offers products via e-commerce, catalogues, and over-the-counter (OTC) retail.

Established more than 60 years ago, Otto Group generates more than €12 billion in revenue annually, functioning as a globally active corporate group of retailers and retail-related services. Subsidiaries include e.ventures, a venture capital firm, fashion company Alba Moda; financial services such as Eos Group and RatePay, as well companies such as Blue Yonder, which offers real-time predictive analytics.

But for the Otto Group, e-commerce is the fastest-growing sales channel with more than 120 major companies including BonPrix, Otto, Crate & Barrel and Hermes.

The company’s growth and diversity, however, creates complexity. With a vast array of brand names within the Otto Group, it had more than 100 reports, which included different KPIs and metrics. With no common base for web analytics, the company lacked a clear overview of the market, including traffic sources to the websites and whether this number was growing. The company needed a way to see, in real time, what was delivering in the market across all its brands.

This requirement is even more pronounced, with intense online competition from Amazon in the online retailing space. The ability to analyze and understand online spending patterns, and respond to customer requirements in real time, is critical to competing in this environment.

How This Business Opportunity or Challenge Was Met:

The Otto Group needed to understand its customers across its multiple brands, and have the complete picture of customer interactions through unlimited data collection and multi-channel measurement across social, mobile and web.

The Otto Group selected the Webtrends toolset to help provide an up-to-the-minute view of customer interactions. The solution, which includes Webtrends Streams, enables Otto Group business leaders and analysts to view real-time analytics through configurable digital dashboards, with data reporting to custom and calculated metrics.

The Webtrends solution delivers raw data to the Otto Group’s Hadoop cluster for further analysis. Data delivered for analysis comes from the many brands within the Otto Group, and the system was designed to handle the complexity of reporting across multiple domains and provide valuable insight to drive business decisions across the group. This consists of more than 100 domains in Germany, Austria and Switzerland covering desktop and mobile domains, apps, and various landing pages.

Measurable/Quantifiable and “Soft” Benefits from This Initiative

As a result of the implementation, manager at the different brands of the Otto Group are now able to compare different business approaches, share best practices, and optimize their e-commerce operations.

Otto Group’s approach was to establish standardized KPIs across the portfolio and provide greater transparency to the executive board. The real-time initiative included a series of workshops to align each brand with the same objective. This allows Otto Group “to drive revenue and have accurate reporting,” says Dr. Lars Finger, vice president of the e-Commerce Competence Centre of the Otto Group. The company’s decision makers also are able to use real time data in a custom-built dashboard.

(Sources: Otto Group, Webtrends)

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